So ok this book doesn't have anything to do with tattoos. It's a love story about a girl who's a music journalist that moves to NYC and shares a tiny apartment with a singer / songwriter who is also her brothers best friend and bandmate. The two hook up and the band starts to make it.

It's actually a good story, I couldn't put it down. What's really cool, at least for me, and the reason I bring it up is that the crappy apartment happens to be on the Lower East Side....on Ludlow Street. And get this,

"She nodded up at the building, which was narrow, made of dirty beige bricks, had a four-tiered fire escape running down it's face and housed a tattoo parlour called Daredevil on it's ground floor." SO cool!

Tiffanie Debartolo gets a thumbs up from me the story moved along and kept me hooked the whole way. I felt like the charaters were my friends, but the coolest part is that they were also our neighbors.

Get this book check it out and get a little glimpse of life on the LES.

I finally got through this book. It took a while, and it wasn't easy I set it down a couple times. As much as I like John Irving (also wrote The World According to Garp, A Prayer For Owen Meany, The Cider House Rules....) this wasn't my favorite book by him. I had such high hopes, there's all these elements in the story that hit close to home for me. The main characters mother is a tattoo artist and his absent father is a church organist (my mom's an organist). Irving's books have a tendency to meander about seaming to go nowhere until mid way through you realize everything is connected and you need to start from the beginning because you were'nt paying close enough attention to the details. Somehow though this book never really brought it home for me.

I was so interested to see where he would go with the tattoo thing . It was fun to look for familiar names to be mentioned. " Jack called Hanky Panky at the house of pain in Amsterdam..... A group came from Italy....Manu and Tin Tin from France. The Las Vegas Pricks were there, and Holywood's Purple Panther ......They crammed the pews, where Ed Hardy , Bill Funk , and Rusty Savage appeared to have appointed themselves the old girls bodyguards" (hard to imagine Hardy as anyones body guard) then, "...a broad shouldered man in a bright yellow sports jacket....he had so much gel in his hair, which stood straight up, that the top of his head resembled a shark's dorsal fin, both were familiar to Jack from the tattoo magazines he'd seen - Crazy Philidelphia Eddie ; there could be no doubt"

Yesterday morning I caught a clip on CNN about tattooing in Iraq. I had my camera and managed to get some shots.? Like this one at left with the guy tattooing with one plastic glove. It turns out? tattooing used to be the type of thing that would get you killed in Iraq. Saddam outlawed tattooing because it was seen as "too American". To Muslims it is "Haram" or forbidden, considered a desecration of Gods creation. These days though CNN reports that business is booming for tattooers in part because many people want to be tattooed so their loved ones can identify their bodies in case they are killed. Apparently there are countless unidentified bodies in Iraq from all the car bombings, terrorist attacks, etc. People are getting their names and phone numbers tattooed on them so their family can be called if they are found. About 100 bodies are found each day in Iraq nationwide. Most people have been taken from one neighborhood and killed in another.

At one time tattooing was a mark of pride in Iraq. Women would be tattooed on their faces with lines and dots on their chins and men would get tattooed on their hands and wrist. Saddam himself has three dots tattooed on his wrist as a symbol of his "humble origins"

Chuck was as happy as a pig in shit this afternoon, with this "sweet ass piece" he did? today......That's right, the girl got a drill, tattooed on her ass. She said she liked tools. Fair enough.

Close.......Jamie comforts Sienna in New Yorks Daredevil Tattoo Parlour

British Tabloid The Sun reports....

SIENNA AND JAMIE GET A TATTOO?

Ah? It must be love.